A MORE consistent and co-ordinated effort is required as an estimated 1000 people affected by continuous acid rain on Ambae Island have moved to Santo and Port Vila, a spokesperson for the Ambae disaster committee has revealed. Ambae was under threat from the Manaro volcano eruption last October, and while the threat has dropped back to level two, acid rain and ash that continued to affect the island has affected more than 5000 people, destroying their crops and fields.

Henry Vira, in an interview with Islands Business, said people were moving away at their own costs and trying their best to be resilient in the face of such hardships. He said while the government and civil society organisations continued to support communities with food, the assistance has been irregular. “Individual families in acid affected areas have moved to less affected areas along the coast of west Ambae and families need...

Islanders return to acid rain

WATER and sanitation testing is on the priority agenda for Ambae Island as it recovers from mass evacuation amid fears of the imminent eruption of Manaro volcano last month. Around 11000 people were evacuated to neighboring islands last October for safety as volcano alert levels was raised to four – the highest in Vanuatu’s alert matrix. Late last month, the Vanuatu government lifted the state of emergency and Ambae Islanders were allowed to return. According to an account of the Ambae situation reported on November 15 by Vanuatu’s disaster officer, Manson Taridenga, the country’s water and sanitation cluster was now cleaning and testing water quality in wells and tanks, while at the ssame time carriny out water and sanitation awareness.

Acid rain is a new thing to live with for the people of Ambae, and its negative impact can already be seen in the growth of vegtables like cabbages thus forcing some to move further north to the coastal areas....

ant invasive iguana (GII), also known as American iguana, in Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second biggest island. Last week villagers living near Viani Village, on the south coast of Natewa Bay, caught a male GII, a reptile that could grow to two metres long.

Nearby resident Jay Browning said while the male GII was killed, it was unfortunate that a female was also spotted but it escaped into the forest. Biosecurity Authority of Fiji (BAF) had declared American iguanas as pests and they are working closely with villagers to find others believed to be in the forest. According to BAF the pests were brought illegally into the country some 10-plus years ago and released on Qamea Island.

They have since spread to neighbouring Laucala, Taveuni and Matagi islands and now to their nearest main island, Vanua Levu. American iguanas breed rapidly and a female can lay 50 to 80 eggs. As herbivores they pose immediate threats to food security, eating plants such as dalo leaves and cassava tops, bele, tomatoes, cabbage, beans and yam vines. The last sighting on Vanua Levu was in 2014, when Tawake villagers on the west coast of Natewa Bay, found and killed one on their shores. The scenic Natewa Bay is the biggest bay in the South Pacific.

IN the South China Sea, the Chinese Government has now built up a string of artificial islands that are robust enough to hold aircraft bases and give their regional neighbours a serious case of the jitters. Millions of tonnes of rock and sand have been dredged up from the sea floor and pumped into reefs to suddenly create 800 hectares of pristine Chinese territory.

Thousands of miles away in the tiny South Pacific nation of Tuvalu, the New Zealand Government has also been quietly engaging its own form of island reconstruction. Much to the delight of the Tuvaluan people New Zealand recently spent around $NZ10 million to fill in the “borrow pits” that were created when the United States effectively turned the capital atoll of Funafuti into a giant aircraft carrier during the later stages of WWII.

These open borrow pits which have blighted the atoll of Funafuti for decades were created when the United States started building a new runway as a launch pad for the bloody battle to reclaim Tarawa Atoll from the Japanese in November 1943. This runway now accounts for approximately 14 per cent of the total land area of 14300 hectares on Fongafale, the main islet of Funafuti. At only 26 square kilometres Tuvalu is the fourth smallest country in the world and 6000 of its 10,000 inhabitants live on Funafuti.

THE “Nuku’alofa Declaration for Sustainable Weather and Climate Services for a Resilient Pacific” was endorsed by the first ever Pacific Ministers of Meteorology in Tonga in July. This is the first historic step towards strengthening Meteorological Services across the Pacific island region at such a high level and now that the winds of support have propelled the Meteorological Services this far, it is hoped the momentum will continue.

It has been estimated that since 1950, extreme events including events that are non weather related such as tsunami, have affected approximately 9.2 million people in the Pacific, with close to 10,000 reported deaths and damage to the value of US$ 3.2 billion. Over the last decade some Pacific islands have experienced natural disaster losses that have approached and in some cases, exceeded their Gross Domestic Product over a single year. For example, losses in Niue due to Cyclone Heta in Niue in 2004 amounted to over five times the 2003 GDP.

The vast majority of the 284 recorded disasters that occurred in the Pacific island region between 1950 and 2013 were caused by weather related events, especially severe storms. Both individually and collectively, these disasters have had enormous social, economic and environmental consequences. For those that experience them however, these extreme events are more than just statistics. This is at the core of work by the Pacific Meteorological Desk Partnership based at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) - to help promote the role of the National Meteorological Services and their responsibility in saving lives during severe weather events.